Almost exactly one year after the idea of porting Portage to MacOS X came
up - and the joint Metapkg initiative[1] between Fink, Darwinports and
Gentoo took off - a 20-head-strong developer team around Pieter van den
Abeele[2] (strategic lead) and Daniel Ostrow[3] (operational) is now ready
to release an extraordinary beast into the wild: Gentoo MacOS. They
deliver on a promise no other Linux distribution has been daring enough to
make yet: Portage on MacOS is now fully operational, seamlessly integrated
as a package manager in a non-Linux operating system. It initially serves
the main purpose of an SDK for inclusion of new packages, testing and
patching. Granted, KDE isn't ported yet, but make no mistake: Gentoo MacOS
is ready for consumption by Macintosh users who want, say, scientific DTP
via TeX, something they will now be able to simply emerge in OS X just
like they'd do in Gentoo Linux."Right now it's a tool to install lots of
commonly requested applications on OS X", explains Pieter van den Abeele.
"But in a few months, we'll have a port system that builds Darwin from
scratch, provides a standardised lookup and installation routine for
Dashboard widgets[4], enhancements and tools like the Desktop Manager[5]
and many, many more popular OS X applications." Downloading the Gentoo
MacOS Installer provides users with a patched portage, its tree, and the
Python modules. It sets environment variables and demands a bootstrapping
shell script to be run before the first emerge that detects the operating
system (Panther or Tiger), chooses the relevant profiles and injects every
application it finds already installed in MacOS X.

Since Gentoo's own GCC ebuild for MacOS X isn't ready yet, compiling is
currently done using the Xcode development tools[6] which include GCC 3.3
provided by Apple. "People already on Tiger can experiment with GCC 3.5",
adds Pieter. Tiger, the new release of MacOS X, is due in 2005 with its
brandnew database filesystem Spotlight[7], modernised video services and
many other features. The Gentoo MacOS developers are busy polishing the
knobs (a Cocoa user interface is part of the plan), getting iSync[8]
integration to work (emerge an application on one machine, automatically
replicate onto all other Macs in a LAN), right down to making Catalyst
produce Darwin LiveCDs... "But first the cool stuff, then Darwin",
chuckles strategic lead Pieter. Even though his team is already larger
than the entire Gentoo Linux PPC developer group, they still train new
devs almost daily, and whoever wants to help with the project is very
welcome to get in touch. The public Wiki[9] holds installation
instructions and serves as a reporting tool for packages outside of
Portage that already compile without bombing out. The Gentoo MacOS
Installer can be downloaded from here[10].

Not that I've found... this is a very exciting day for me. Now I don't have to choose between the sexy OSX and 1337 ppc linux... I will run all the tasty GNU apps on the tasty OSX.

Already installed it, and everything seems to be working great... not many packages unmasked for macos though! I'm sure that'll change in a couple weeks once folks figure out what does and doesn't work.

I'm very excited to get my fingers messy with this one! ill be buying an ibook soon and will intsall this asap.

my plan is to run osx off the internal harddrive, and then eventually purchase a faster .xternal drive to run pure gentoo from. my goal is to have a portable sound studio for live music production! I cant wait to start bugtesting!_________________Could it be?

I've been messing with it and it seems to be running fine. "emerge sync" takes abnormally long, and a lot of packages don't work. You can see on the gentoo wiki page how to add the macos keyword to an ebuild. This can get old since you have to add the keyword to the package you want as well as all dependencies.
I agree we should add a forum topic for just gentoo-osx. I can't wait until they add support for native osx applications!

Yeah, that would be sweet... just "Emerge Colloquy" and it downloads and installs the .app file... would be cool.

I've been playing with it since yesterday, and since finally getting it working, things seem to be going OK -- as stated above, very few things are unmasked yet, but I'm sure within a month or so the basics will be unmasked._________________~Anticipat3~

But in a few months, we'll have a port system that builds Darwin from scratch, provides a standardised lookup and installation routine for Dashboard widgets, enhancements and tools like the Desktop Manager and many, many more popular OS X applications.

just finished installing gentoo-macos, seems flawless for now, i'm very impressed. sure, alot of builds are masked but as previously pointed out, that does not mean they won't work. i just emerged links, worked like a charm._________________Think Different, Think Emerge.

I saw mention that there was a case sensitivity issue in HFS, but I have not seemed to have any problems. I am guessing they recommend you put the portage tree on this UFS volume, but does anyone know if you "really" have to?

Last edited by cmoad on Tue Jul 20, 2004 9:44 pm; edited 1 time in total

It seems that they would like for users to report packages known to work on macos but happen to be missing the macos keyword in the ebuild. However, the Bugzilla infrastructure at bugs.gentoo.org does not seem to have been updated to specifically mention MacOS yet. Should we just use "PPC" for the hardware platform, and "All" for the operating system? Or, should we early birds just wait until they get around to updating Bugzilla?

At any rate, I would like to mention that the tin-1.6.2 ebuild builds out of the box just fine for me on Panther, with USE="ipv6 ncurses".

+chris

P.S. For what it's worth, my entire filesystem is HFS+, and I have not encountered any problems with Gentoo so far. I did have to rerun the bootstrap-macos.sh script after doing an "emerge sync" before everything seemed to work just right for me, though. Prior to that, I had problems with emerge not being able to find dependencies like virtual/os-headers and other general weirdness. (Sorry, I didn't save any of those error messages...)

I saw mention that there was a case sensitivity issue in HFS, but I have not seemed to have any problems. I am guessing they recommend you put the portage tree on this UFS volume, but does anyone no if you "really" have to?

Isn't the entire portage tree lowercase now? I remember that being an issue a couple months ago.

I usually just look at an existing ebuild that is similar, but obviously that will be hard for you. Good luck and keep us posted.

- Charlie

I meant more about making Mac OS X native app ebuilds, specifically ones using Xcode as a build environment. The ebuild I worte kinda hacked it and I was wondering if there will be an xcode project eclass.

I meant more about making Mac OS X native app ebuilds, specifically ones using Xcode as a build environment. The ebuild I worte kinda hacked it and I was wondering if there will be an xcode project eclass.

my friend and i were talking about this. it would allow programs such as adium to be installed using portage. a world of possibilities.

After fighting with fink and portage for a couple of hours, I finally got rid of every last trace of fink and portage seemed to install correctly. (PowerBook G4, 1GHz, 10.3.4)

Now I'm getting errors when trying to emerge system. I managed to get one package emerged without problems (autoconf i think), but ever other package i've tried has failed miserably.

wget fails with stdio.h missing. I had gotten this error a couple months back when i first installed gentoo on my desktop and it fixed itself after a kernel recompile. So, I've tried re-installing developer tools and running the bootstrap-macos.sh script again. I haven't reinstalled portage from scratch yet because frankly, I'm tired of looking at the incredibly slow installation program.

other packages I've tried:
nano - fails because of no glib, glib masked
gentoolkit - ncurses include-path not found

other packages I've tried:
nano - fails because of no glib, glib masked
gentoolkit - ncurses include-path not found

Has anyone found a solution to any of these? I'm open to suggestions.

no need to emerge nano, it comes packaged with osx, as far as gentoolkit, it emerged fine here, im not sure why you would be getting the ncurses error. maybe it has something to do with fink?_________________Think Different, Think Emerge.

ok so i wasnt sure as to which thread i shuld post this under but here goes...

im completely unfamiliar with gentoo and have just about got the hang of fink and os x...used this site>>>gentoo-wiki.com to gimme a lil more info as to how i can install but i seem to be having some problems. got up to this part and well im kinda unsure where to go from here....

* >>> Injecting sys-darwin/X11-4.3.99 ... [ok ]

Portage successfully tamed your Panther.

typed in #emerge system but it sais command not found
where have i gone rong

Are you trying to use terminal to run the command or X11? I ran in to the problem of emerge not being in my path in X11. In terminal.app type

# which emerge

if it doens't come up with anything, then I think you're having issues with fink being installed. Just as a test, I searched for all files with fink in the name (using finder) and dragged them over to the trash (for safe keeping ). I then got rid of all the portage files using the uninstall info from the wiki page. Portage should install correctly after that, but obviously you won't be able to use fink unless you get rid of portage and pull fink back out of the trash (you will loose all your apps installed with fink).

There is a way to do this without getting rid of fink, by modifying some config files or something, but I could never find out how. You might try poking around the irc channel.

I had the same problem. emerge is installed in /usr/lib/portage/bin , and that's usually not in your $PATH (this has nothing to do with fink, AFAIK). So in order to use emerge, you can either give the entire path or add the directory to your path. I use zsh, so I had to add it in .zshenv; I forget which file it is when you're using bash (.profile maybe?), but that won't be difficult to figure out. I had to re-run boostrap-macos.sh after doing emerge-sync, but after that, everything ran just fine:

For me, "emerge sync" just gives me a stream of "Failed cache update" errors for every ebuild.

I'm guessing I need to create that image, but the wiki doesn't explain crap.

Quote:

hdiutil create -size 750m <Imagename> -volname <Volumename> -fs UFS

Well that's nice. What should "Imagename" be, what should "Volumename" be, and then WTF do I do with it?

I can't wait for this to be ready for prime time. I was able to emerge swi-prolog-lite with no issue, and that's something I was really needing (Fink doesn't have it for 10.3, not even in unstable). And of course my Linux boxes are all Gentoo.